Upscaling Images: A few questions.

Nethawk

Nethawk

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Hi all. trying to up my post count and therefore be eligible to participate in the sales/purchasing part of the forum - and of course learn a few things as well. I have a few questions regarding upsizing images:

1) When opening an image up in PS CS2, my images open up in Jpeg formats of course. Don't have a camera yet that does RAW. Before doing anything, should I save my image as a copy and a different format such as Tiff or Psd? I assume I should.

2) Say I want to scale the image up to 20X30. How do I make sure my image will be the same at that size without being distorted. What I mean by that is that my originals are 9.5 X 14.2 at 300 pixels/inch. If I'm upscaling the image to 20 X 30, then technically speaking my final image will be 20.5 X 25 if I go the 110 percent increments and Bicubic Smoother method, which means I'm already messed up if I want a 20 X 30 image. How do I actually get the 20 X 30 image size?

3) And lastly...before doing any of this, since I want to rework and refine my images extensively with CS2, should I upscale first to the poster size I want, or should I work on the image first and then upsize at the end? If I do the latter, if I've applied a pile of filters, used imported elements (with matching resolutions of course), and so on, won't that degrade my final image after it's upsized?

many thanks to anyone who responds. You won't believe this, but I've been working with PS for nearly nine years now and not once have I ever printed or upscaled anything to anything larger than A3. So I'm a noob all over again in this area. LOL!
 
To get to your 20 x 30 you will need to work out the ratio of width to height and then start by cropping your image to that ratio. Then when you start to upsize you should end up in the right place.

I haven't done this either but thinking logically I would do all my processing at the original image size and upsize after that.
 
changing from a .jpg to tiff/psd won't give you any benefit...you can't make an 8bit image into a 16bit, as mentioned your best to do all the editing before upsizing except for sharpening which should be applied last and ideally tailored to the final print size

simon
 
Change to a Tiff if you might edit the photo again, continually saving as JPEG after changes can affect the quality as some compression always takes place.
Whether the deteriation is noticeable is another matter :)
 
I recently had a 30 inch by 20 inch print done

I sent a full size conversion from RAW 4288x2848 @300dpi to the printer and they did the upscaling.
I have the shot framed and on the living room wall of the customer and it looks magnificent
 
Change to a Tiff if you might edit the photo again, continually saving as JPEG after changes can affect the quality as some compression always takes place.
Whether the deteriation is noticeable is another matter
Click to expand...

See, that's exactly what I've always done in the past (though I used Psd format instead of Tiff). In all the upsizing tutorials I've read however, no one mentions image degradation after continuously modifying a straight Jpeg. Guess that's what I had trouble with. So I'll continue to save immediately in a lossless format prior to any changes as I usually do. Thanks. :)
 
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